Just had an #anxiety overwhelm moment while looking at my to-do list, so I put it down and found myself looking around my room. I had to stop myself from doing that and just close my eyes and curl up instead, because every object in my room is automatically linked to multiple thoughts and associations, many of which are Things I Should Do.
I found myself thinking of a past therapist who often encouraged me to do a ’name five things you can see' activity to deal with anxiety, and how unhelpful I found it.
A strong pattern with my #autism is getting caught up with and overwhelmed by my own thoughts, which can certainly run wild on their own but are also easily triggered by things I perceive around me, and I wonder if anyone else #actuallyautistic can relate to this and find commonly recommended sensory grounding methods, presumably helpful for many people, to be totally useless or even harmful.
@actuallyautistic
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@samiam @actuallyautistic
Do you find it difficult to get rid of things because the stuff you need to throw out •has its own emotions•? ... Like, WTF is wrong with my brain? ... But my house is getting junky and it gets more paralyzing the junkier it gets, and now I know how people unintentionally become hoarders.
Anyway, I find it hard to kill things that aren't alive and so I'm the one suffering.
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@roldan_belenos @actuallyautistic I have feelings about objects that make it hard to get rid of things, but it's not exactly a sense that they have feelings. It's more of depersonalized sense that things should be appreciated and used, that they deserve to be useful and by throwing them away I'm doing something wrong. I might describe it as what the objects "want" but I don't literally of them as though they have feelings or a personality.
It's possible that I used to do that as a child but it's very deeply buried...
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@roldan_belenos @actuallyautistic now I'm having more thoughts about this. I think that overcaring about the feelings of objects is one of several "mental traps" that I identified as very real threats to my sanity and functioning back when I was a child. I have long since built very robust safeguards into my thinking, which at one point felt healthy and helpful, and then for many years passed entirely out of my conscious awareness, but have lately resurfaced and now I have a faint inkling of a sense of an idea that I would "naturally" care about these things a great deal, but I've essentially dehumanized them (you know, like humans sometimes do to other actual humans) so that I don't have to care.
I am not ready to look very closely at that, though. Yikes 😬
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@samiam
Empathy for inanimate objects seems to be a common theme... I'll absolutely talk to my plushies (they're sharks, they won't answer) and there's definitely a more general sense of objects having something of a "personality" - not necessarily the same way a human would, but not something to be entirely ignored either. It's very obvious when I'm talking about machines doing what they do, to the point where most people around me have picked up on it.
@roldan_belenos @actuallyautistic
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@roldan_belenos @actuallyautistic I've heard that hoarders have a feeling like the sentimental attachment that might prevent someone from throwing away a small but meaningful trinket, but that feeling is dialed up to eleven and is triggered by literally every single thing they own. I don't know for sure and I haven't ever had occasion to directly discuss it with someone who has experience, but if that's reasonably accurate it feels very understandable to me.
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@roldan_belenos @actuallyautistic I'm trying to say that the feeling that I imagine can drive people into deep hoarding is one that evokes a sense of sympathy and understanding in me, not that I experience it or claim to know what's the experience is really like for others
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@roldan_belenos @samiam @actuallyautistic This is really common: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30101594/
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@sejarnold @roldan_belenos @actuallyautistic oh man. Now I have to read it 😭
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@sejarnold @roldan_belenos @samiam @actuallyautistic
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So what’s the opposite trait? DGAF about mere “things?”
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We look at the world and we think caring about “things,” is some weird trait? Why are we talking about the carers, is what I’m saying, why is that a thing, and the opposite isn’t?
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@roldan_belenos @samiam @actuallyautistic
Had 24 years of that at our previous house. Then we got a huge industrial sized rubbish bin delivered. It took some time to conquer the emotional attachments, but once I started tossing stuff into that bin, it became easier to decide what was going to be taken to our new house.
It's a refreshing experience, and somehow easier to fill a large dump bin sitting outside the house, than trying to pick things to cart off to a refuse station in your car.
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